What was the biggest or most important no you gave or received that led to the biggest yes?

Great question. The biggest no I I gave was when I went to Japan in 2001, okay, and I went to see Takara and they showed me Beyblade. I don't know if you remember Beyblade, okay?

So, they showed me Beyblade and they said, do you want to distribute it for North America? I said, let me take it back home. I went back home. I showed the guys, the team, and everybody's like, ah, spinning top, not so cool. called them up, said we're going to pass on it. Okay. Six months later I go back to Japan. I'm like curious. I'm like, guys, what's happening with Beyblade? They're like, oh, it's going fantastic. We're producing a TV show. Okay, and I'm like biggest thing in the world. I'm like, I'm like,

can we uh do you think we can do it? They're like, no, we just did a deal with Hasbro. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, you didn't tell me about the TV show. They're like, it's gone. And that moment, okay, Beyblade went on to be, in the last 25 years done $3 billion of sales for Hasbro. It will continue and do another $3 billion of sales for them in the next 25 years because once you have a perennial amazing toy, especially a toy supported by a TV show, it just goes and goes and goes and goes, as long as they support it.

And that moment for me, it was like imprinted in my body, that pass, okay? And four years later, there was a 23-year-old kid that had an idea of putting an action figure in a marble. And he had all these pictures, just drawings,

and he showed it to Ben Durmer and my partner Ben Varadi in our company. And we were like, that's a really innovative idea. And so we licensed it from him, we developed it, and the best we could do was like a marble and you opened it up and the action figure you peeled them out. And and I said to myself, this is not going to, this is good, but it's not great. Right. So I went back to Japan, this is 2006, and I went to Tomy. I said to them, would you partner with us on this product? And they said, no.

Then we went to Bandai and they they passed. And then I went to Sega Toys and there was Mr. Kokobon there. He didn't speak us he didn't speak a stitch of English, nothing, okay? And he said, we'll partner with you. He said, come back in three months. I go home, I come back in three months. Three months later, he his team develops this whole pop open transformation mechanism with a spring, with a magnet inside, with cards that you roll them onto, with metal inside, and you flip the cards over and you battle together.

And I'm like, this is unbelievable. And then I said to him, I said, what do you think about doing a TV show? And he said it's going to cost $12 million, do you have six? And then I said to him, okay, now you get it, give me three months. I'm going back and asking the the thing. And you went back to. I went back and we said, okay, we're in for the six. And we created the show and we ran it for four seasons. Um it did a billion dollars in sales over four years. We shook our company from $450 million of sales to a billion.

And if I didn't say no to Beyblade, which was the wrong no, right? But in a sense, maybe it was the right no, then we wouldn't have gotten into producing our own TV shows and that may have never led to things like PAW Patrol in our company.